Exec sings goodbye to Microsoft on YouTube

A Microsoft project manager joins another company, but not before posting a YouTube video in which she sings her eulogy to Redmond. It is, in its way, affecting. Depending on your current emotional state.

When I first saw this I thought the first line was "Long, long lines of coke."

I thought this would be a contemporary dirge to the emptiness of the corporate American dream. This was, after all, being sung to Don McLean's "American Pie."

Sadly, it seems, the first words are "long, long lines of code." For this is the resignation ditty of Karen X. Cheng, a project manager at Microsoft.

I sing a haiku to TechCrunch for explaining that she is leaving on a jet plane to work for something called Exec, a new startup created by the nice man who brought us Justin TV.

I found myself tensing to see how Chen would rework the lyric: "This will be the day that I die." For there would be something deeply poetic in retaining it as a gesture of true emotional commitment to the Redmond cause.

Sadly, she reworked it to "forever recalc or die," which presumably is some terminology that makes certain people feel unaccountably emotional. She does, though, seem to wish Excel a swift immolation.